Confession #7: The past is no more

Damn.

I'm growing up.

I just got back from a night out with friends, old friends from high school that I hadn't seen for a while. We didn't do anything special, just hung out at the pond we always used to swim and have bonfires at while we talked into the late night. We did that again, everything was as it was; except it really wasn't.

Our one friend just got back from South Africa on a 'service and learning' program. Another is leaving for Spain for a year in a few weeks. They talked about college, what they've done, how they've been drinking (we were never that crowd in high school), what bars they want to go to in a year when we're 21, etc. The usual topics showed up, but the lightheartedness was gone.

Monday we wouldn't all be going to be walking the same halls together. We wouldn't share the same gossip, sit in the same classes, have the same schoolwork. We wouldn't be continuously connected like we once were. All of us have our own lives now. Those lives come with our own problems now; grown-up problems. Where to live, how to afford things, managing work and life, relationships, bills. No more are we helpless and carefree highschoolers. We're living in the real world now.

I look back at other nights spent at the Pond, nights we spent laughing, thinking about the future, hoping for such great things. We were so carefree then; only foolishly worrying about some essay or asinine test and only looking forward to life after graduation. There was no reason to grow up, not yet, so wasting time gossiping, swimming, and eating s'mores was the perfect way to pass a few hours.

Now, though, it's all changed. The changes are small, sure, but noticeable. We no longer look ahead, we look behind and reminisce about high school, how we were friends, what we did, when we had fun. We worry about real things now that impact our lives; food, money, housing, life in general. We gossip, but it's self-centered. Nobody knows our friends now, or our lives, where we go and with whom. We embellish to look good, to impress, we never would do that before. Then again, we never had to, we all experienced almost the same things

Still, it's weird, looking at my friends and realizing that we are, at the same time, closer and farther apart than we have ever been. We are connected through our past, years spent together forging bonds that have lasted this far, and yet our futures are all completely different and it isn't even certain we will all remain friends. As it is some among our ranks haven't come back. It's like two different versions of the same people converging at the same place; what we remember from the past and what we have become.

The past is remembered and loved for what it was, the future is feared for what it can be, and all of us just want things to be as they always were, even though they can never be that way again. It's both terrifying and sad at the same time. We are still friends, no doubt about that. We laughed and joked, talked and remembered. There were instances where time and place were forgotten and we just were; we were kids having fun and being ourselves. But then, something would break the illusion, our eyes would lose that joyous spark, and the would would come back to us in one crushing moment. For that time, those few precious moments, it was like nothing had changed, even though everything had.